By José-Alain Sahel, MD
The Eye and Ear Foundation Endowed Chair, Department of Ophthalmology
As we look back on 2024, I am deeply proud of the exceptional strides we’ve made at the UPMC Vision Institute. Our commitment to improving quality of life through the preservation and restoration of vision continues to drive everything we do. This year, we have advanced our mission across the three pillars of patient care, research, and education—each contributing to our vision of being a leader in eye care, advancing the frontiers of eye research, and shaping the future of eye health and treatment.
Our research program, ranked eighth in NIH funding, continues to make impactful strides in ocular immunology, retinal disease, glaucoma, and advanced diagnostic technologies. These efforts are directly improving the care we provide to our patients.
In education, we continue to train the next generation of ophthalmology leaders. Our residency program, which trains six new residents each year, along with our fellowship programs in retina, cornea, glaucoma, oculoplastics, and pediatric ophthalmology, are shaping both future clinicians and researchers.
Our clinicians continue to deliver personalized, high-quality care while expanding our subspecialties to meet the evolving needs of our patients. New faculty and positions have helped us stay at the forefront of advancements in treatment.
The campaign that our Eye & Ear Foundation launched shortly after I joined Pitt and UPMC has met all its objectives and beyond. This is an excellent time to celebrate what we have achieved thanks to the unprecedented support of the Eye & Ear Foundation team, Board and donors, the local Philanthropies working synergistically with our Institutions, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and the Medical Center.
I am excited for the future as we continue to innovate and make strides in all areas of ophthalmology. These programs must continue and grow. As long as people continue to be affected by blinding conditions, we must extend our efforts and launch new initiatives. Among many examples, we need to design and run innovative clinical trials for untreatable conditions, e.g., ultra-rare gene defects, advanced glaucoma, retinal degenerations, optic nerve trauma, and tumors, and ensure that our city is a place where all can benefit from such breakthroughs.
Here are a few examples of the initiatives made possible by the support of the Eye & Ear Foundation. This also demonstrates that the investment in our teams was leveraged and amplified multiple times.
- We grew the Louis J. Fox Center for Optic Nerve Regeneration into one of the strongest in the world, leveraging existing support into major funding and recruiting leading talent. Important recruitments are reaching the final stage and a major ARPA-H grant supporting eye transplantation research started in November 2024, co-led by Stanford and Pitt.
- We are bringing our corneal stem cell program, the brainchild of the late Jim Funderburgh, to the clinical stage.
- We have preserved and expanded our ocular infections and immunity expertise around the Campbell Laboratory. The lab has obtained all accreditations.
- We established a platform assembling the most advanced high-resolution imaging of all eye structures, with multidisciplinary expertise in optics, engineering, artificial intelligence, biomarkers for the progression of genetic, inflammatory, and genetic diseases.
- We launched the most innovative vision restoration programs, including prosthetic vision, cortical stimulation, gene therapy, and optogenetics, and performed first-in-human trials.
- We are developing novel patient-centered methods to assess the impact of visual impairment in real life and the transformative benefit of vision restoration, based on the quantification of daily activities in the StreetLab laboratory, the driving simulator, and incorporating the patient voice using narrative research methods.
- We provide fully integrated vision rehabilitation with leading, caring experts using our novel life-skills apartment, all novel technologies, including augmented reality.
- We are assessing and improving constantly the quality of care, using constant monitoring of multiple metrics and a digital twin approach.
- We offer the most advanced surgeries, including multidisciplinary, using high resolution, three-dimensional imaging for retinal surgery, novel lasers for cataract and refractive surgeries, novel drainage systems for glaucoma. Multidisciplinary teams are involved in very complex surgeries, bringing the best possible care to our patients.
- We are ensuring access to care is possible for all, continuing and expanding our community initiatives such as the Guerilla Eye Service, Mission of Mercy, Street Medicine, the EyeVan offered by the Brother’s Brother Foundation, and the constant commitment of our patient advocate. In parallel, we are analyzing the impact of social determinants of health and developing solutions to improve the follow-up of patients affected with complex, chronic conditions.
- At the Ron Salvitti Surgical Training Laboratory, we are training the current and next generations of surgeons in the most advanced techniques.
- For the past three years, we have offered community ophthalmology technician training programs and jobs. We have also trained Hillman Scholars from underserved communities to conduct scientific projects, and several of them have successfully applied to elite college programs.
- In its second year, our Gene Therapy Bootcamp has exposed a wide range of individuals to the most advanced methods, contributing to the building of a workforce in our region, and now growing into a national program.